Have we been lied to about our health once again? A viral story unveiled...
The truth behind lead in tampons...
I can’t lie, I felt frustration, stress, and anger when so many videos about the study stating that tampons contain toxic and heavy metals came up on my feed. Once again women’s health was underlooked I thought to myself, and we’re talking about a product that is actually needed and used by millions of girls and women. It’s estimated that over their reproductive years a woman used on average over 7,000 tampons. I first thought, “it’s not surprising”, at the end of the day no menstrual health product had been tested with real blood and published up until August of 2023 by a group of women. So, I went and found the actual study not just the press articles to understand what was actually carried out and the truth behind these viral findings.
The screenshot is the abstract of said study, part of the results clearly stating that toxic metals were detected and at elevated levels. What a great start, I thought to myself. As a side note, toxic is also a bit of a wildcard term, many things when ingested in varying amounts can indeed be toxic. For example, nutmeg the lovely Christmassy spice - if you ingest a huge spoonful of it (hoping that not no-one actually would), it could be toxic to your body and even cause hallucinations, seizures, and confusion. Toxicity has to do with the amount ingested for a big part. In a similar manner, lead, cadmium, and arsenic, are naturally occurring elements, they’re present in the soil, in the water we ingest, and even some of the natural produce, as it is taken up by the plants.
Anyways, back to the study. If we look at the methodology carried out, they analysed tampons of different brands purchased in the US, Greece, and the UK. In total there were 30 tampons, but as they tested each twice the total sample size was n=60. Thus far, the only thing I would comment on is that there is no power analysis to prove that this sample size is big enough to see variation between the samples. But now the interesting part begins.
In the methodology section the following is written regarding the preparation of the samples:
2.2. Sample preparation and analysis
Detailed information about sample preparation and analysis is provided in the supplemental material (Section 1: Detailed Methods). In brief, we acid digested 0.2 – 0.3 g of tampon in a microwave digestion system (MARS 6, CEM Corporation, USA).
Last time I checked, no one actually dissolves tampons in acid nor heats them up, aka microwaves them, prior to using them. But I went into the detailed methods in the supplementary section and looked further into what they did, so I would not jump to conclusion just yet.
They used nitric acid, which is highly acidic with a pH of around 1-2 depending on the concentration. To put it into perspective, our stomach’s acid concentration varies from 1.5 to 3.5, while the pH of the vagina is higher at around 3.8 - 4.5, which is still acidic but much less than that of nitric acid.
Now, let’s go to the next step which is the microwaving. The samples were exposed to heat, starting at room temp and raising it to 180°C for 65 mins, and then kept them in there for another 20 mins at 180°C. If you’ve ever used an oven you will know how hot 180°C, and for comparison our internal temperature would never exceed past 40°C.
So, clearly based on their extraction steps this is something our body could never replicate as this also affects how things are extracted, and thus absorbed. Simply, this is not the same as the environment of the vagina, and also far from a real life scenario - for anything as a matter of fact.
Let’s address a basic question - why do tampons actually have lead in them? As I said at the start lead naturally exists in the soil, and as they’re made of cotton, aka a plant, the lead is taken up from the soil. For example, a meta analysis looking at levels of lead and cadmium in rice reported a pooled concentration of 0.10 mg/kg and 0.16 mg/kg, respectively.
This leads me to the next question - what was the concentration of lead? The study reported a geometric mean of 120 ng/g. If I were to convert this to mg/kg, just like the rice example, this would be 0.12 mg/kg, so on par with rice. But don’t forget the quantity of rice digested by a person on average is significantly greater by weight. An average tampons probably weighs 2-3 grams, while a standard portion of uncooked rice is around 75 grams.
Want to be even more shocked? Bottled water also contains lead. The FDA has a limit the level of lead, and that is 5 parts per billion (ppb) or 5 ng/g. If you drink 2L of bottled water per day that is up to 10,000 ng potentially ingested. Not wanting to worry anyone, this is purely for perspective and benchmarking the amount as these values standalone don’t mean much, and these cut off values have been deemed safe.
Now, do I completely disagree with carrying out such a study? No, if products are being used routinely, we should know what potentially harmful products are in them. But I do disagree that they did not emulate our body’s environment. Would this suffice? One word: NO. 1. The methodology used simply is not representative of a real condition, and 2. the way our body potentially absorbs such metals would need to be studied, in order to understand (a) the amount absorbed and proportion of exposed, and (b) if this just remains in the vaginal cells or enters our bloodstream.
There definitely are limitations in this study and it wasn’t in their scope to understand if such metals are released into our body, and if so the amount thereof. However, this was taken out of proportion by various media outlets, it was simply made viral for profit. This doesn’t mean this will always be the case, but, the tens of videos I saw on social media talking about the lead and toxic metals in tampons was very high - with little to no information on the study itself. Just shows that everything needs to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, read yourself about such claims and discover what the underlying truth is. Hopefully, this has provided you with some clarity about this viral story.
I hope you enjoyed, and thank you for taking some time out of your day to read to my post! See you next week! :)
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It's amazing how media can blow things up. I love this breakdown of the study!!!
I’ve been told that the vaginal walls do not absorb things; that’s why you can’t use boric acid mixed with vaginal antifungal cream to treat (almost overnight) yeast infections. But ingesting boric acid can be dangerous.
Our daughter uses a menstrual cup (wish they’d been around when I was younger) with great success; risks would be similar to diaphragm usage.
Yes, the media blows many things out of proportion, fails to provide context, misreports and disseminates disinformation almost continually.
Thank you for doing the heavy lifting research to put this issue into its proper perspective. General population choose spoon fed dumbed down fodder and the news media depends on “shock” factor to keep watching them watching.